richardfontana
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
Some courts expect Word format. I haven't been close to litigation in ages so I don't know how common a thing this is, but here's an example of an apparent "Word only" federal court: https://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caednew/index.cfm/attorney-inf... . So sure, in a hypothetical where a lawyer stubbornly refused to use Word in the context of a filing in that court, you can imagine consequences arising to the level of malpractice, but I don't think that's what they had in mind.
A more familiar issue to me (and I'm guessing what that speaker was thinking of) is that if you're negotiating an agreement with some other party, and they are using Word (as they most likely will be), it is going to be highly inconvenient at best to insist on using some alternative tool.
Red Hat's in house legal team is, er, was not a law firm of course, but ages ago Red Hat attempted to have as many 'back-office' staff use RHEL as possible, with few exceptions related to what was necessary for regulatory purposes. This extended to Red Hat's legal team, which attempted valiantly for a while to use OpenOffice (as was, and I suppose more specifically the RHEL packaging of the go-oo fork in those days) for all document-related purposes, including negotiating agreements with outside parties who were using Word. This proved to be impractical for at least the subset of the legal team that did that sort of work as their daily bread and butter, and eventually they got access to Word on Windows on VMware. Later on, it became possible for Red Hat lawyers to use OS X and Windows with Word, so the issue went away.
The curious question though is why 389 was formerly called Fedora Directory Server. From what I've been told by someone who was around at the time (as I wasn't), it's because Red Hat went through a very brief period where it experimented with using the "Fedora" brand as a sort of general "upstream of Red Hat, sponsored by Red Hat" sort of community brand. This was I think quickly rejected as a bad idea but Fedora Directory Server was apparently the one (for a while) surviving example of the experiment. I imagine that the reason for the rebranding was that it was confusing to use the "Fedora" name at a certain point because the directory server project never really had anything particularly to do with Fedora (apart from the connection to Red Hat).
Now, as to why it's on the Fedora Legal Docs site today, that's because a few years ago we undertook a significant migration of all "legal" content from the basically deprecated Fedora Project wiki to the newly created Fedora Legal Docs site. In general, such material is now much easier to find than it was in the wiki era (where it was spread across multiple wiki pages). I don't know when the trademark notice first came to be placed on the Fedora wiki, which itself didn't always exist, but I believe when Cornell-UVA and Red Hat signed the agreement, Fedora may have still been using a redhat.com site.
This is a phenomenon in eastern Massachusetts that I've been hearing people talk about for ~25 years. I've heard it hypothesized as an attempt to be hostile to outsiders.
I'm having trouble imagining where a useful ring line could exist in the New York metropolitan area or within the city itself, given its geography, longstanding commuter movement patterns and other characteristics. Maybe you could have a relatively small ring just in midtown Manhattan?